“A 100m tall cliff-face of blue mirrored glass, stretching 500m along a triumphal plaza, the New Century Global Centre [in Chengdu] houses an entire seaside resort, along with a 14-screen Imax cinema, Olympic-sized ice rink, two five-star hotels and its own Mediterranean shopping village – all wrapped with a vast ribbon of offices.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
Pierre Cardin Gives Up On His Skyscraper Over Venice
“The Palais Lumière, a 254 metre-high skyscraper planned for the ex-industrial area of Marghera, 9.5 kilometres from the centre of Venice, will not now be built.” Cardin is “abandoning the project because two and a half years had gone by without the necessary permissions being granted,” due to opposition from local officials and residents as well as Italy’s culture minister.
Onstage Death Is Only Latest Of Cirque Du Soleil’s Woes
“Saturday 29 June was supposed to be the day that Cirque du Soleil turned the page on recent financial and artistic setbacks, and sent a message that it was still the most powerful player in live entertainment in Las Vegas. Instead, it ended with the worst tragedy in the French-Canadian circus company’s history.”
Why Disney’s Lone Ranger Was Doomed To Be A Financial Sinkhole
Andrew O’Hehir: “One could also understand big, stupid, money-losing pictures as a feature of Hollywood’s production system, rather than a bug. … The movie industry, at least at that level, operates on the same delusional principles as the military budget or Wall Street executive salaries, where bigness, waste and needless expenditure in all directions become markers of significance and ambition.”
The Bolshoi Scandal We Missed: Star Ballerina Walks Out Of Onegin
Svetlana Zakharova, one of Russia’s most famous dancers, was to take the role of Tatiana opposite US visitor David Hallberg in several of this month’s performances of the John Cranko ballet. But last week, when she discovered she had not been scheduled to perform on opening night, she stormed out of rehearsal and refused to return to the theater.
Jane Austen Was A Game Theorist
Political scientist Michael Chwe “discovered that Austen’s novels are full of strategic thinking, decision analysis, and other tools that would later come to be prized by game theorists like those as the RAND Corporation just after World War II.”
Does The Noise Of A Coffee Shop Help Your Creativity? Now You Can Stream It Over The Web
“Recent brain research has shown that the moderate ambient noise of café chatter and espresso machines, in the range of about about 70 decibels, fosters creative work … Coffitivity plays an audio feed of the optimal noise level of clinking cups and people talking. It also makes recommendations on the volume at which to overlay your own music for maximum concentration.”
Australians Uninhibited? Not When They’re In An Audience
“Australia often seems to be a nation of cordial clappers and polite head-dippers when it comes to live performance. There are exceptions – festival-goers and, oddly, ballet audiences can be soccer-mob rowdy – but years of seated ovations and quick-to-fade clap-alongs suggest something happens to Australians when we arrange ourselves in rows and stare in the same direction.”
Sufism’s First Lady Of Soul, Abida Parveen
“Anyone who has watched her on stage knows that this magnificent projection of calm often ends up a wild, sweaty, ecstatic mess. She has admitted to hallucinating while deep in performance and she regularly sends her audiences in Pakistan and India into swaying raptures, swooning and fainting being quite standard reactions.”
Pompidou Centre Takes Its Mobile Exhibition Hall To Saudi Arabia
“The Centre Pompidou in Paris is abandoning its mobile museum project at home and plans to launch instead a temporary exhibition in Saudi Arabia, modelled on the show that has toured the French provinces for the past two years.”